102 Creating a better impreSSion ;1 i I /. , ! II :1 . : 1" . . .;" 1 . , f '> . i . :) <: \'; .. I tîi" t ' J f .' f "i Cross Writing Instruments î:n 14 Kt. Geld Fined and $tetUng SHver" MechanicaHy guaranteed." for a lifetime of W , f , it , ì , ng , pt-ea$ ::fe , ' CROSS @ At BeUer Stores Wortdwtde. $12.00 Pen or Pencil. $24..00 the Set. SJNoe 18A'S CoHO$- Ii. "F. ç :j -t,otltP-A.K't, LlA-(;Ø , {i:" f., ::t!!"''' , ,*,,-11- \. , marry this one?' But then the whole thing became absurd: Dress up. Chit- chat. He pays. You sleep with hitn. I said to myself, ";Vow, this is like be- ing .::1 whore,' and stopped. After that, I had trouble relating." Fve was studying EnglIsh at the time, and writing stories. (Her first storv, she says, was an inadvertently feminist comedy. It took place in New '{ ork, which she had never seen, and involved a crowd of women rLInnIng out of Schrafft's and being swallowed up by hig green huses in the hape of caterpillars.) For a while, she thought c::tbout going to graduate school, but she savs now that the thought of more "male lit- " d . d } " I èrîture Iscourageler. would read these novels, and they'd an turn out to be so Inalc-chauvinist. D. H. Lawrence was 111) worst 111oment. I began to under- stand blacks' not relating to white liter- ature, because there I was, thinking, How cal1 I relate to a literature that doesn't account for the female cxperi- ence? It brought up the old qULstion of why womLn fail. ';VeIl, how can a \V0111an succeed if to do so she has to re-form herself In ter111S of the m.::lle experience? " Eve went home to Cleveland when she finished college. She spent the neÀt two years working at a ghetto settle- 111en t house for children, and then she took a joh in the office of an experimental-theatre compdny dnd started seeing a psvchiatrist .::It .:1 local universit} clinic. The psychiatrist was a young Freudian who, according to 1 ve, di.::1gnosed her malaise as a case of penis env}. "It was the Inost horrihle C'\.- perience of 111Y life," she say s whenever he talks c::loout the doctor. "13r the time ] W.:1S through with th.:lt 111.::1n, I was a t ahid fe111inist. No l11atte r w ha t I'd sa r to hi111, he'd sa), 'Eve, accept your seÀ- udlin.' I'd tell him I wanted to be a vvriter; he'd tel] 111e to be '1 woman in- stcad. I'd tell hi111 that I was down on romantic love, becduse the 111yth of ro- I11antic love puts so Inuch pressure on women and leads to an sorts of anxIety; he'd tell Ine to start wearing makeup if I wanted to keep 111Y boyfriend. vVell, he l11anaged to shut off ever) Ineans o{ c0111munication. Like, 111Y ooyfriend at the ti111c was t11dnipulative and sick, and the hec::llthiest thing about mc then was that I didn't want to keep hi111. Finall), I told the sh rink that J'd like to t.-dk ahout Iny 111other. He wouldn't let ml. So I asked him about his horoscope. I said, 'I bet ) ou're a Pisces.' \Vell, his Inouth dropped open. 'How did you know?' he saId. L1\nd I said, 'Bec.:luse you're just Eke 111Y mother, and she's a Pisces.' rrhat, I think, was the la"t time I ever saw him." Eve came to New York in the fall of 1966, after a tnp through Europe with a younger sister. She had a Stl ing of publishing jobs-each of them, she says, distinguished by the fact that the women in the office kept typing and the men kept getting promoted-and a string of roommates, and then she found her apart111ent in Chelsea and her job with the chen1ica] cOlnp.:1ny. rrhe title on het door there was "Di- rectur of Public Rclations," hut Eve says th.::lt the c0l11pany, which wanted to justify the fact that she was getting a third the salary of the man who had had the job before her, put her on the payroll as a public-rc- ]ations assistant. "I waS dis- CI i111inated against, and I was in pain," she says. "Like, every day SCHne awful chel11i';t would come up to Ine and ''\ b "I 'I ..... k 1 ,,, say, .i\.re you usy a e a etter. Th,lt fall, when NLW York R.:ldical \V 0111en formed, Eve was at its first 111eeting. She never went back. rrhe people there, she sa) s, depressed her. Redstockings, which she joined next, apparently depressed her, too-"There was a lot of hostility to neV\l 111elnbers, because new mel110ers wet en't sup- posed to have high consciousness" -hut she stayed on this time, went to the meetings every week, and quit the gt Oup onl) for the founding cadre. "I saw at that first cadre meeting that there were some serious differences between us," she says now. "But I think thc::lt's natural. rrhis is an evolu- tionary, not a revolutionary, Inove- ment, and the old structures are still strong, in one way or another, in each of us. Still, J Inake a bjg distinction between 111) thinking hefore femini"m .::lnd m) thinking after felninisn1. 13<:- forc feminisn1, I wanted to get Inar- ried, because I fLIt I cou]dn't do the things I wanted to do if I were .::llone. Now, after feminisl11, the necessit) for l11arriage is not there, although I still feel pretty good aoout the idea of a 111arriage where I can function free]y .:lS .-1 h Ll111an heing-a 111arriage that doesn't push 111e in to î traditional fe- Inale role. I want responsible independ- ence with a man and the freedom to he as c0111plex a he is. I guess I'll need .:In eccentric man for that-I Seem to seek out eccentric mèn anyway-be- caUSe the so-called normal 111en usual- 1) can't permit their W()1nen to be .::lS complex as they are. ';Vhat happens, I think, is that most men keep their emo- tions so bottled up that when they final- ly do release thel11, with a woman, they can't tolerate any threat to her depend-